Coastal quake risk: Japan on watch, Northwest ‘essentially blind’

Eiichiro Araki is seen with some of the latest instruments that will help him and his colleagues monitor an offshore fault threatening some of Japan’s biggest cities — afault very similar to one off the Pacific Northwest coast.

TOKYO — If you expect your sensors to transmit data from the seafloor for a decade or more, it pays to do a lot of testing upfront.

That’s why Eiichiro Araki and fellow researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology set up shop earlier this year in an equipment plant on the outskirts of Tokyo.

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